One of
Michigan’s recurring public concerns during the past quarter-century is the
possibility that politically powerful arid regions could take so much Great
Lakes water that the lakes would be irreparably diminished. One prominent
response to this anxiety is Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s proposed Water Legacy Act,
which would impose a permit system on much of the state’s agricultural, utility
and business water use.

Proponents of
heavy-handed water regulation, whether under the governor’s proposal or the 1985
Great Lakes Charter, have a rhetorical advantage. The usage thresholds they
propose that would trigger government control always sound huge — 100,000 gallons
per day, or a million gallons per day.

But let’s put these figures in
perspective. Actually, they are not so large.

Consider a 15-acre plot — about the size of a small country
cemetery. Sprinklers apply a quarter inch of water on the parched grass.

That’s 100,000 gallons.

Suppose you’re lazing on the bank of a creek that’s 20 feet
across and two feet deep and moseys along at one mile per hour. You nap for 45
minutes. While you were asleep, a million gallons of water passed by.

Relatively small rivers contain stupendous volumes of
water. The Huron River flowed through Ann Arbor last Sunday[1]
at a rate of about 4,400 gallons per second — meaning 263,000 gallons per
minute, or nearly 16 million gallons an hour. In East Lansing last Tuesday
morning,[2]
the flow of the shallow, little Red Cedar was about 2,100 gallons per second, or
100,000 gallons per 48 seconds, or more than 7.5 million gallons per hour.

Bigger rivers are staggering. The Grand River at Grand
Rapids last Tuesday[3]
was moving a million gallons in less than 17 seconds. That day, more than 5
billion gallons of water passed through the city.

The vastness of the natural hydrologic system is further
emphasized by precipitation. Mid-January’s flooding rains amounted to well over
an inch of water in portions of the state. Then the crippling Jan. 22 snowstorm
added up to a half-inch of liquid. Two inches of precipitation across half the
Lower Peninsula total about 700 billion — not million, but billion —
gallons.

The Great Lakes reflect precipitation abundances. The Army
Corps of Engineers reports Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are more than 9 inches
higher than a year ago. Nine inches of water in those two lakes equal about 7
trillion gallons of lake water that wasn’t in the lakes 12 months ago. Here’s a
little-recognized fact: Trillions of gallons routinely come into and leave the
lake systems through uncontrollable natural events. Last spring’s heavy rains
swelled those two lakes by roughly 10 trillion gallons — give or take a trillion
or two — in only one month.

These figures should be kept in mind when someone proposes
prohibiting water withdrawals. An ironclad interstate compact being developed
under the Great Lakes Charter would trigger a multistate regulatory response if
1 million gallons per day were to be diverted from the Great Lakes Basin. If
this withdrawal sounds enormous, it helps to remember that along Michigan’s
rivers you can watch a million gallons go by in only the time it takes to eat a
sandwich — or in some cases just chew and swallow one bite.

Or consider the rejection of a 1999 proposal in Ontario to
ship Lake Superior water overseas by tankers. The numbers involved sounded
large, but the permitted annual volume amounted to less than
one-three-hundredths of an inch from the lake — a tiny amount compared to the
annual fluctuations in lake levels, as noted above.

Similarly, some suburbs of Milwaukee are asking to tap into
nearby Lake Michigan. A proposed annual usage rate would equal less than
one-one-hundredth of an inch of the waters of Lakes Michigan and Huron. While
the small size of the difference isn't decisive in the debate, it does remind us
that Milwaukee’s suburbs are not actually trying to drain the Great Lakes.

Human impacts on water supplies are often surprisingly
negligible against the monumental scale of natural hydrology, especially in
Michigan, the Great Lakes State. In this context, even "big" numbers are often
very, very small. Citizens shouldn’t let the simple mention of "millions of
gallons" of water justify new water-use regulations that would purportedly
prevent shortages that haven’t occurred under our current system.

#####

Daniel Hager is an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center
for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in
Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted,
provided that the author and the Center are properly cited.